


A Girl in Green

by birdinastorm



Series: Journey Into Mystery Sketches [1]
Category: Journey into Mystery, Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 18:10:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20313808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdinastorm/pseuds/birdinastorm
Summary: How do you live your own life when you're not sure what living is?





	1. One Day in Hel

**Author's Note:**

> This is a WIP I've been working on for way too long. Basically I was obsessed with Journey Into Mystery and then Leah in particular. She's a weird sort of character, who seems to resist the narrative while being given no way to grow beyond it. So I tried to imagine what that would be like from her perspective.
> 
> Loki's POV, which I've decided to not use at all, is the other part in this series

Leah has no beginning. There was a time when all she knew was her place by Hela’s throne and she had no reason to believe she hadn’t been there forever, would be there forever, and be devoted to Hela forever. Time moves in Hel at a pace somewhere between the coursing of congealed blood and the infinitesimal decay of some rare mutagenic element, and no one in the realm could be bothered to mark it. For Leah and the rest of the beings in Hel there was only being what you were, and your being was certain to go on for uncountable, and therefore uncounted, days. Leah herself could not really tell how long she spent being nothing but Hela’s handmaiden, and thinking of her time and existence as not her own. She did not think of this time fondly, but she thought of it often, trying to dig back to the precise moment she became aware of her existence. But of course this is impossible, given that so many of her days then were precisely the same, any one of them might have been proceeded by any other, and any day could have been her first. 

Her days were spent thusly: she was to sit on a tripod to the right of Hela’s throne, mostly hidden, awaiting her command. Unmarked time passed between commands, and sometimes she was allowed to leave her post to go to a vast library, where a wispy shade of a tutor silently handed her books on magic. He occasionally pointed emphatically to important passages, or showed her the necessary hand gestures, but never said a word. His silence wasn’t much of an issue, she often had the impression of remembering the spells rather than learning them anew. Leah was aware that many of the dead were like her tutor, fading away. Perhaps the only thing keeping this shade in Hel at all was this one responsibility to her. Otherwise the last threads of his tenuous being would unravel, slipping into the space between things and into the void forever. Hela had a protocol to stave off this fate. Her mistress had not yet taught her what this protocol was. 

Only this steady accrual of magic spells and procedures in Hel could give her clues as to what order the events in her memories were in. It was in this time before learning how to retrieve shades from the brink of the void that she was the most ignorant, and therefore compliant and malleable. It hurt to remember this version of Leah, she hated her devotion, her shallow curiosity which was completely filled with dusty magic tomes, and most of all her contentment with this rigid existence, unchanging. If she didn’t know better, Leah could have called that early Leah happy. After all, the living realms were so far from her own, where will and impatience and frustration existed, all unknown to her.

During one tutoring session, when she learned to stabilize portals for traveling from one dusty point in Hel to another, Hela herself appeared. Her mistress awed her, though she never showed it, because she instinctively knew that her awe would anger her. Her power, magical and otherwise, was unfathomable. She had not shown any more interest in Leah than she did her many, many other dead servants. That she hadn’t sent a messenger to retrieve Leah from her lesson frightened her more than anything. Hela arriving here was a change she did not know the meaning of. The portal that she had coaxed into existence, one that spanned a greater distance than she had ever made before, and had confidently shored up just before Hela’s arrival, began to collapse. She saw her own hands shaking and could not will them steady, and as her attention fled from the portal it snapped shut in a flash of green light, shooting dust and debris from the remote terminal. Her tutor made a motion as if to push this failure away, giving her a reassuring smile, yet Leah felt only dread. She had never once considered what might happen to her if she failed any of Hela’s commands. Her mistress seemed unmoved by her failed spell, merely watching with royal impassivity, but Leah could not quell the thought. What would happen? What even could happen? 

That was when Hela spoke. “I have come, Leah, to give you a new responsibility, and this responsibility is the most important one I will impart to you. It is also one you may carry out without my direct instruction.”

This pronouncement broke the spell of that dizzying contemplation of failure. A new feeling rushed through her, the feeling that she was being given something more precious than she could have possibly imagined before now. She was being given the power to govern herself. She wasn’t commanding an army of dead warriors, or a flight of valkyries, but it was a start. When Leah remembers this now, she feels both the pride she felt then and the sadness at having been so stunned by such a simple, yet fundamental gift. And yet, failure had not been a possibility until this moment. 

“Your task is this, Leah…”

* * *

The warrior saw the girl approaching, pushing through the crowded hall. A young girl in the hall of the honored dead? Even more strange, the girl seemed as substantial as a living person. Her shimmering green dress and her dark curious eyes gleamed so brightly, that the warrior whispered to herself, beneath the din of the eternal feast, “A living girl! Almost the age of my own sister…” As if summoned, the girl noticed the warrior staring and beamed straight for her. 

“Hello!” the girl said, and curiously she didn’t need to raise her voice over the cacophony of the hall. 

“Hello,” the warrior replied, so astonished that she kept whispering as before, but the girl seemed to hear her. The girl’s keen gaze was unnerving, but she reminded her so much of her little sister, her much younger sister. She had hardly ever dealt with young children in her life, as her mother was not blessed with many children. It had only ever been her, for years and years until her sister arrived. She was already almost an adult, and getting ready to leave home, but she stayed for a while longer to help her mother raise this new baby. Her mother chided her, while being grateful for the help, saying a daughter must go and get married and have her own children. Those demands she always dodged, while making herself useful at home. As her sister grew up they became close. She was grateful, for even between siblings much closer in age it’s not always like that. Her sister used to bring back little treasures for her from the fields whenever she went out to fetch the goats back, little flowers or interesting leaves or a handful of berries. When she finally left home to become a soldier, the letters her sister sent always had a flower pressed inside. 

“Hello!” said the girl in green again, in the same enthusiastic tone. 

The warrior focused on the girl again, that little anomaly. She must not be much older than eleven. She said, unthinking, “Are you alive?”

The girl cocked her head to one side, a flicker of disquiet before she answered, “I know that those who live come here when they die, but when I think about it I know no other place. I came from here.”

The warrior did not know how to take this answer. Those who live… The strangeness of the girl struck her so strongly that it jolted her. 

“I know so much about life, though,” the girl continued, in a singsong tone that sounded a bit like the cues her sister would use to get the right response from her.

“Oh and how is that?” the warrior responded, in her best silly adult voice, but thinking, how can you be here, have been here, with the dead?

“I know,” she said, drawing out these two words like she was saying “obviously”, “because I ask as many of you as I can how you lived and died! Could you please tell me your story?”

“Yes of course!” she said, “but it can’t be all that interesting, I’m not much of a storyteller.” But the girl smiled such an artlessly wheedling smile that it sealed the deal. The warrior felt as if she was already missing something. “Oh, but we haven’t introduced ourselves yet! I am Ama, daughter of the clan… clan of… well it doesn’t matter… of Vanaheim. And you?”

The girl puffed out her chest. “I am Leah, daughter of no-one, handmaiden of Hela, the queen of this realm!”

“That’s quite a title! Well met, Leah” Ama laughed lightly. “I’m sure I didn’t meet anyone so distinguished while I was alive.” The girl’s attention gave Ama a kind of energy she didn’t get from the company of the dead, even as dear as some of them were to her. She felt alive, almost. “Oh! You asked me for a story about me, what would you like to hear?”

“I like hearing of battles best, and most of the warriors here love telling me about them, but if it makes you sad you don’t have to.”

“You know I was very proud to be a soldier and to be able to protect my clan, but I didn’t relish it. You remind me so much of my sister. May I tell you about her?” Leah nodded and sat down on the floor and looked up at her expectantly. 

“One day,” Ama began in her best storyteller’s voice, “my sister Cara came running up to me, saying ‘Sis, sis, I saw a golden squirrel in the woods, we have to catch it!’ Her voice was very serious, not at all like when she enlists me in a game. I had finished my work for the day and told Mother we were going hunting. She didn’t think much of it. We weren’t allowed in the woods except for hunting or gathering herbs, and this sounded like a hunt to me. Cara takes my hand and pulls me towards the woods, spouting all kinds of things about where this squirrel should be, and I ask ‘Well but where did you see it?’ but she doesn’t really answer…” Ama, haltingly at first, but with growing vigor, tells Leah of the hunt through the woods, how Cara kept insisting the squirrel was “actually in this place, because”, making them crisscross the woods, slashing brush with their knives and fording creeks, all the while Ama never sees their quarry. As story unfolds the hall fades and the woods of Ama’s childhood emerge, thin shadows at first, but soon the story has created the woods around them just as Ama remembered it. The sun slants through the trees and the birds sing, the flies buzz and the feet of the two intrepid hunters can be heard crashing through the brush. Ama hardly noticed, because it’s her memory, but Leah soaked in the sights and sounds. This is the peculiar effect of a shade upon the substance of Hel, that they can create around them what they expected to see of the afterlife. When prompted about their life their strongest memories can briefly shape the realm around them. “The sun’s going down,” Ama continued, her ghostly face bathed in the colors of the sunset, “and still Cara cannot let this squirrel go, and I finally I sit down and say, ‘what is this squirrel that you need it so badly, we need to go home.’ And she looks at me all sheepish. ‘Well, it’s a wish granting squirrel and I knew you wouldn’t believe me but Garret saw it! And he told me where it was supposed to be!’ ‘And you believe Garret?’ I said. And oh, you better believe she was mad about that. But then it occurs to me, what’s she need a wish granting squirrel for? And she tells me, I need it ‘cause I wanted to make sure you weren’t going away soon. There was no way I was going to mad at her for that, even after getting us lost for a bit there.”

“Did she get her wish anyway?” Leah asked.

“No… I was going to leave that Spring to train and there was no way I was going to miss it. And I don’t regret it, but to be honest I would’ve liked to have had much more time with her.” The woods faded behind Ama and for a brief moment the feast didn’t return, and the true nature of the space they were in was revealed. A hall of gray stone and slate flagstone, built by unknown hands before the realms had names, dimly lit by the even steel gray sky, with dust in the corners from the wastes of Hel that had accumulated steadily over eons. Then Ama’s face bloomed with illusory torch light, and the merry sounds of the hall of the honored dead returned. Leah thanked Ama for the story and turned to leave, pulling herself out of the illusion. It was not often that Leah saw what the dead saw, and the stark difference gave her vertigo.


	2. Wraiths

The grinding machinations of the living world would send the dead walking across the dry plain to Hel’s gate in a steady trickle, where the guards would bring them to their queen and be welcomed into the halls. Leah, unless she sat on the tripod, never saw the newcomers, and was not curious enough to seek them out. Her duty as always was with the maintenance of the souls already in Hel. Otherwise her mind was given over to turning over the latest problem in spellwork her tutor had given her. She had been pacing along the ramparts of Hela’s palace, mulling over an issue with splitting entangled spirits when a guard approached her and silently kept pace with her until she acknowledged his presence. 

“What is it, sir?” she asked with no more interest than she could muster for a speck of dust. His blurry face showed no emotion.

“We are admitting more dead than usual. Hela requires your presence at once.” 

Interested now, she followed the guard to the great hall with a half suppressed smile and a surge of pride. She was required! 

The great hall was streaming with dead, wandering aimlessly here and there. They had the confused look of those who had died suddenly and unexpectedly. Her good spirits evaporated. Something was very wrong, an undercurrent of tension ran through the crowd of souls, and some of the faces she caught sight of were distorted by emotion, something that looked a lot like fear. But what could the dead fear? She helped guide them towards the servant holding the book of the dead, where they would be accounted for before being moved off deeper into the realm. As she moved closer to the gates of Hel she saw it, the source of their fear. 

It was a wraith, shaped somewhat like a warrior. It was stalling at the gate, as if it were considering walking back out of Hel. Unlike the dead it came in with, who generally looked as they did as they lived, its image was that of its body at the time of its death. Blood wicked up its thick braid from a sickening great black wound in its back. Just looking at it made her recoil, but she gathered her resolve and walked towards the gate. It seemed to gather even more substance as she watched, the dead around it melting into a state of silent, abject terror. She had to end this soon, or the wraith would become unstoppable, fueled by primal fear. 

The wraith was shouting hoarsely, “He sent us against it, knowing we would die, knowing there was nothing we could do! One eyed bastard, I’ll piss in his eye socket! Listen! Listen! Listen you whelps, he’d send us again if he could, to die and die and die again!” It finally realized Leah was there, and spun towards her, braid flicking black blood on the flagstones. “You, girl, do you love our fair king? Who sent us here? Isn’t he a fine and fair king?” 

Leah steeled herself for the game she was about to play, her least favorite. She looked at the wraith as evenly as she could. “He’s not my king, I answer to the Queen of Hel.”

“Do you now, do you now?” The wraith nodded and grinned a bloody grin. “Is she a fair one?”

Leah smiled. “You know all rulers are only looking out for themselves.”

The wraith nodded even more vigorously, its grin strained with something like pain. “You’re a canny girl, you know. I would find him and show him what I felt seeing that thing— the hopelessness, the rage.” The wraith’s voice dropped to a growl, baring its bloody teeth. “I would eat him alive like what that shadow did to us.”

“I can take you to him, your king, but you know you can’t go back the way you came,” Leah said, waving at the gates of Hel and the plain beyond. The wraith’s eyes narrowed. “This is Hel after all. I’ll have to sneak you out. Come with me.” She turned and walked away decisively, hoping the wraith would follow. After a moment’s hesitation, the wraith fell in behind her, muttering with caustic glee. Apprehensive resolve filled her. Wraith and girl made their way down to the deepest part of the palace, to the well spring. 

Down here it was so dark that Leah could barely see, and completely silent save for the sound of water burbling up through rock. The room, walls made of roughly hewn stone, was probably the oldest structure in Hel. The air was damp but smelled fresh. A single rivulet ran from one wall and dropped into a six foot square basin, deep as it was wide, with stair steps on all sides. The basin then drained into a slit that ran from the edge of the basin into a single crack which opened out into the void between worlds. Here and only here could all things be washed away forever. 

Leah pointed at the crack. “That is the way back to Odin. But you’re in no condition to see him. Ought a warrior be proud and gleaming?”

The wraith twisted its face into something between a mocking smile and a genuine snarl. “Yes, but who has the time? Open the way for me!”

Leah hesitated to answer, and before she could say anything the wraith was already diving towards the crack, and to total oblivion. “Stop!” she commanded, her voice rang like a bell in the small space. The wraith stumbled and fell, struck by the weight of the girl’s power. For a moment both beings were dumbfounded. The wraith pushed itself up into an animal-like, wheedling stance, like a dog that knows it’s done something wrong. 

“What must I do, girl, to have this way opened for me?”

“Simple, you must look the warrior you are. Come, sit in this bath and I’ll polish you up.”

The wraith stepped sideways without taking its eyes off Leah, wearing a nasty humoring look, as if it still had ways to trick her, which it did not. Leah waved towards the water calmly, but with unseen force. It stepped down into the basin and the moment the water seeped into its bloody clothes its face changed completely. The wraith had been a woman. 

“Oh sweet leaves of the World Tree,” she said, sinking further into the water, “Girl, I was so angry. I still am, but… well it doesn’t matter does it? What was I angry about?”

“Your death was unfair,” Leah said, feeling the sadness in that. She had hung on every word from so many warriors as they spoke proudly of their deaths. She had never seen the dust on their bodies or their mortal wounds.

The woman looked at the girl askance. “I guess that the story we get as soldiers, that we get a good and honorable death is just that, a story. That we die for something and our deaths have meaning. When all we do is die. Hm.” She lowered herself so that her mouth went under the surface, and she watched the surface of the water ripple. Curls of blood swirled from her broken armor. 

“What’s your name?” Leah asked. The woman looked startled at the question. “You don’t remember, do you?”

She lifted her chin from the water. “What’s a name good for anyway?”, she said, smiling wanly. 

“Nothing, now,” she said, “without it you can’t be reborn. You can stay here in the palace and serve Hela, or you may go out among the dead. Your choice.”

“And what was through there?” She pointed at the crack. 

“Nothingness. Go there and you become nothing.”

“You stopped me from going through there, and here I thought you just wanted to get rid of me.”

“Hela values all of the dead.”

“Hm.” She sank down so that only her eyes sat above the surface. The blood had washed away and so had the wraith’s power, and now her memories were being rinsed from her. Leah was about to guide her out of the spring when she sat up again and pulled herself out. “You know, Hela is supposed to be some monster that drags you to your death and keeps you for her army.”

“Hela doesn’t cause anyone’s deaths. And when you’re here she only wants to protect you.”

“You have to admit she’s monstrous though, with those big horns and what with being half-dead and half-alive and all.”

“What do you mean by that?” Leah asked sharply.

“Oh? She’s dead on one half of her body and alive on the other, isn’t she?” The former wraith said carelessly.

“How can you tell?”

“I have no idea, I guess I didn’t think about that,” said the shade, shrugging slightly.

“I guess not,” Leah said flatly. After they had walked almost up to the main hall again, the shade growing blurrier as the power of the wraith dissipated, she asked, “What is it you were fighting?”

The shade’s face flickered again with the distant emotions of the dead, first anger and then fear. “All we saw was a shadow, or a dark reflection, it felt familiar somehow. All I remember is something terrible mocking us before it tore us apart.”

* * *

The unquiet the wraith had caused amongst the dead fell from their dull minds, and by the time Leah installed the newcomers in their halls and set them to their eternal feasts they had forgotten the incident entirely. The memory of the wraith stayed with Leah, however, and in her mind it grew in power. She saw its bloody braid and dripping wound and felt its anger. It rose to her unbidden in her studies, and followed her out into the dry plain as she took stock of the dead. Though she had been taught about wraiths and how to deal with them, meeting one was so far beyond her expectations. It seemed to her that it had not been destroyed, merely taken residence in her, where there was no spring to offer it oblivion. The distortion of emotions that the dead had so easily shaken off would not leave her so readily. 

She began to seek out different sorts of stories, stories more like Ama’s, people who felt their deaths were not glorious or noteworthy. Perhaps there were more dead here that felt the way the wraith did, though less keenly. A wraith is simply a shade who would not accept its death, such a stark refusal that it gains a kind of self-sustaining power. She found those who liked to focus on their lives and felt their death had no purpose, then found more and more of them. That idea, that death is purposeless, made Leah feel as if the ground was tilted, and no matter how she tried she could not regain her balance. Still the image of the wraith came to her, its bloody grin, opening its mouth to speak, but not saying a thing.

Leah moved further and further out through Hel, her journeys took her less frequently to the palace. If her tutor missed her she no longer cared, if she missed lessons or newcomers, that didn’t matter either. She walked with her wraith, getting its life story in fragments from everyone who shared its feelings of betrayal. The heaviness within her grew, and the plains beneath her feet buckled, the result of some ancient cataclysm. Her wanderings had at last brought her to the edge of Hel, broken earth beyond which laid shimmering nothingness. She sat down on a boulder, facing away from the edge, because her eyes would not focus on it. None of the dead ever came out this far. She was alone, without the comforting stories or the disquieting ones, without any conflicting narratives of life and death. Nothing existed out here, it was just her and her own mind, which was filled to the brim with the memories of others’ lives. Nothing was hers, not even the grinning wraith’s sense of betrayal, obsessed as she was with it. Out of the shadow of Hela and even nearly out of Hel itself, Leah understood that she did not know who she would be without them, and like a warrior stripped of her glorious death, she felt unmoored. Her hands started to shake, and an unknown feeling gripped her throat. She felt as if she were being pressed to the ground, and two tears slipped out of her tightly closed eyes. The sound of a single sob fell in the deadened air, and so startled by the strength of her own emotion, Leah’s mind cleared. She straightened and looked back towards the center of Hel, and only just noticed a thin wraith nestled in a crack. 

She rushed over to it, and slowed down as she drew nearer, watching its thin substance waver with the air her body had moved. It had no form, yet it spoke to itself in a rasping whisper. She had never seen such a deteriorated shade with the power of speech, possibly that was the only thing left in it. She inched closer, straining her attention towards it, listening. Its thin voice repeated a few fragments, like it was chanting a mantra. “Heh hah,” a lungless sigh, then “I did” and then “he came for me” then “I live still”. It repeated this last refrain a few more times before repeating the whole pattern. It stirred as she approached and sat down next to it, as if it felt her presence. “Heh hah,” it said to itself again, then said, “struck out, I live still.” Leah ventured to ask it something. “Do you remember your name?” The wraith, just a curl of black smoke standing improbably still, curled silently. “Hah hah, no name” it said finally, “struck out.” 

“Struck out of the book of the dead?” Leah asked incredulously. Surely not, to do so would mean no sanctuary here in Hel, only oblivion in the void. Dead and lost forever. 

“Heh hah,” it replied, “I live still.”

A strange thought occurred to Leah. “Live where?” she asked. 

The wraith sunk further to the ground. “Not here. Here. I live.”

“Two places?” Strange, was the wraith a piece of a single being?

The wraith shuddered. “Fly fly fly,” it intoned with some urgency. “I did it. I did.” It began to unravel, slowly.

Leah started to panic. It was a wraith but it was still one of the dead, she had to save it, but without a name it would be difficult, or impossible. Its substance swirled out into nothingness. She got up and shouted, “stand up soldier! Stay with me!” hoping it used to be a warrior like her bloody wraith. Its voice barely audible now, it merely laughed to itself again, and in a final burst of will it said, “I live again” and was gone. 

She froze, stooped over where the wraith had been, paralyzed with shock. Thoughts rushed through her, running faster than ever, dizzying flurries of fear and failure. Why had the wraith been here in the first place? It was almost as if it had come from the void, which seemed impossible. Why had it been denied safe passage into Hel, struck from the Book of the Dead? Its final words, “I live again”, were equally baffling and frightening. How could a being be reborn without a name, having been struck out? What a hated thing it was, whittled down nearly to nothing, yet she could not help but feel its loss. How could she explain what she saw to Hela, she would have to tell her that she lost it, lost a weak wraith. What would Hela even think of that? Would she rejoice even? Not knowing what to do she simply sank to her knees and stared. Dust swirled in the hollow. A gust of wind tore across the open plain, whipping her hair into her face. Wind? Hel in its stillness never harbored wind. She heard the cry of a messenger crow over the gust, howling in the broken vales, “Leah, our Leah! Return to the palace at once!” As the crow came near and alighted upon a rock, she steeled herself and told it about the wraith she had seen. “I lost it, without its name, I couldn’t call it back,” she cried. The crow listened, head cocked to the side, with some impatience, and finally croaked, “That shade is not my aim being here, we must return at once lest we lose many more.” Leah did not need any more prompting, she opened a portal and stepped into the palace. 

She arrived in the palace with a cloud of dust and the irritated crow. Her queen stood looking out at the dry expanse of her domain, and the sky that looked even duller and dimmer than normal. Hela looked over her shoulder briefly and beckoned Leah over, with an unreadable stillness that unnerved her given the urgency of the message. The wind poured through the palace windows, which had never been glazed for weather that did not exist. “What do you think is out there, Leah?” Hela asked. Hela’s demeanor took Leah aback, it was neither distant, nor commanding. Her tone was almost warm, it reminded her of the memories the dead had of their parents, or siblings, or children’s voices. Did I ever have parents? Or did I merely walk out of the dark, out of no-memory and no-thought, she thought. How strange, how strange. 

“A storm,” Leah said firmly, wrenching herself from the trajectory of her thoughts.

Hela gestured to the land laying under the darkening sky. “And something more. The demon Mephisto comes to take this land, dead as it is, for his own hordes, and scatter or enslave our dead. Someone has set him upon this.” Leah could barely listen, as Hela continued to explain, drums pounded in her ears, takka-tak. First the lost wraith, now this. For the first time she felt the pull of time, like a rip tide, bearing her out into the depths, unable to fight it. She had to slow it down, she opened her mouth to speak, but Hela continued, “Moreover, something is happening in the worlds of the living, you saw all those dead who arrived with that wraith, which you made short work of.” A thin smile softened Hela’s monumental features for a moment before it faded. “On that matter we have a guest, we’ll have to entertain his nonsense and hope to get some scrap of true speech from him. To the throne room with me, now.” 

Leah followed, still reeling, and it just keeps coming, an inexorable wave of events. Nothing like pulling stories from the dead, she was not used to it at all. She took her usual place in the shadow of the throne, a familiar perch made strange by the light of the impending conflict. Hela stood before her, and pronounced that she was to entertain the guest, ply him for his knowledge, as she herself was departing to meet the incursion of demons. Leah nodded, mute, and watched her step into a fiery green portal and disappear. Suddenly alone, and with nothing to do but listen to the anomalous wind, she started to breathe again. She shook with the callousness of the crow, and the shock of realizing what was important to her didn’t matter one bit to her queen. She recalled the insignificance of her existence, before she had been given that task that had defined her, and that sense of insignificance enveloped her once again. If the demon stole her dead, that would be the end of her exploring their stories, reinvigorating them, her learning all she could from them. Mephisto would probably do nothing but work them into oblivion. Though she recognized the importance of not losing any of the dead in this larger conflict, she still wanted nothing more than to hold onto that wraith, hated and abandoned by her queen. 

She felt then the frisson of alien magic. A tiny radiant green aperture appeared, flickering in and out as it weakly made purchase in Hel. It flared once and snapped open finally. Leah smirked a bit at the shoddy spell work. To her surprise a boy fell out of the portal, and, to her horror, something else came with him, carrying the undeniable presence of a wraith. She stood at once, the laughter dead on her lips. That was the moment her world began to grow and grow without stopping, the moment the tide took her out so far she could never return. It was when one strange, nasty boy god batted dust off his clothes and disheveled hair, the fester of a wraith hanging about him, looked right at her, and tried out some awful pickup line. It was then when her entanglement with Loki began.


	3. The World of the Living

Leah has a beginning. Perhaps it was when she was sent to Earth, on an ignominious mission to keep watch over Loki. That’s one beginning at least. She watched as dead servants shuffled her belongings through the portal: a stack of books, a candelabra set with ash-gray candles, a shawl, a desk. They set them down in the cave the portal had opened into, and as they shuffled away, Leah took in the place the god called home. As a cave it was nothing impressive, a mere hole in the ground, dark and drafty. The ground was strewn with the god’s things, fatty-yellow stubs of candles, a miserable bed of straw and blankets, a pile of strange cords with flat square ends, and standing there among this refuse, the god himself. Loki reborn, by some unknown process, now the coarse boy that came with the storm. Hela considered Loki’s new form as a kind of insult to her, and to gods in general. Leah, for her part, couldn’t form an opinion of him beyond vague annoyance. The land outside the cave was possibly even duller than the cave itself. It was an unusual kind of desert, created when the gods’ home had fallen and had come to rest on Earth. Nothing crossed it, not even birds. The land was utterly flat, as it was in the center of Hel. 

Loki, however, seemed to have taken upon himself to be the ambassador of this drab world, and was telling her about what was beyond the desert. She barely listened as he told her that there was a village of humans, and humans get up to all sorts of strange things. Loki took her disinterest as more reason to keep insisting that the mortals really are very fascinating. He snatched up a little smooth rectangle, with little shapes inset in its sides and front. “Look, it’s a phone!” Loki cawed proudly, and pressed a shape on the front with his thumb. The whole top surface lit up in tiny images. She was fascinated in spite of her mood, and peered at the ephemeral drawings made of light. “I can talk to anyone, see images of them, go on the internet—“ 

“I have no idea what you’re saying.” she sighed, losing interest again. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, tossing the phone onto a pile of rags. “We should go into town.”

“What could we possibly have to do there? With mortals?” 

Loki looked at her with the bare joy all children are capable of, mortal and immortal, and said simply, “Get milkshakes.”

With that simple excuse to leave the cave, Leah walked with Loki across the waste of Asgardia and into the living world. The distance they crossed to leave the desert was absurd to Leah, it seemed longer than any trek she had ever taken in Hel, including that last one that took her to its broken edges. Yet as the town grew in the distance, she realized she was not as tired as she had been then, and it was just the passage of time that made the town seem so distant. Already the sun had crossed a great swath of the bright blue sky, marking their progress. A new frustration rose in her, this was taking too long! Yet she couldn’t open a portal, being in an utterly unknown realm, she couldn’t predict yet what effect her magic would have.

As they approached the town they seemed to step into a rushing torrent of sound, birds crying and engines roaring, people speaking all at once. A spinning kaleidoscope of meaningless noise. The buildings and the people were all clad in astonishing color, her eyes used to green and dark, and the muted colors of memory. Everything overwhelmed her, but she pressed forward, as Loki guided her to a squat building clad in silver panels gilded in blinding sunlight. The warm smell of everything engulfed her, motor oil and grease, fried potatoes, smoke from a cooking fire. The heat of the sun pressed on her shoulders and her mind boiled over with all these sensations. The inside of the building was cool, a shock and a relief at the same time, though in here it was even louder, the clack and crash of dishes and cutlery, loud conversation. Though the sounds died down as the mortals turned their eyes on them, two alien beings. Leah stared defiantly back at them, at the same time aware that these were not beings she would ever have authority over, except perhaps when they died and only then if a Valkyrie led them to Hel’s gate. The hostess approached them cautiously, tight lipped, and guided them over to a booth by the windows. When their waitress appeared she was equally dismayed, but took Loki’s order for a single vanilla milkshake anyway. 

When it arrived Leah was not prepared for its absurdity, a tall fluted glass of goop, some of it sliding down the sides, topped with even more goop, and a patently artificial red cherry. Loki cheerfully poked two straws into the monstrosity, and pushed it towards her. “Drink it!” 

She sniffed at it uncertainly. It smelled sweet. The glass was cold, and when she experimentally drank some she was shocked to find it as cold as the wellspring, and sweeter than pure honey. It had the barest floral flavor, with a strange headiness like the scent of decay. It was the best thing she had ever tasted. Loki made to grab the other straw, but she yanked the glass away and kept drinking, staring him down. 

“Leah, come on!” he complained, “that’s not how it’s supposed to go, we’re supposed to share, Leah! Come on!” 

She smiled at him impishly. How was she to know how it was supposed to go?

When they returned to the cave, via portal this time, now Leah knew where she was going, her raw senses had begun to calm. Now the cave was too quiet. The sun was beginning to set, turning the desert red. Leah could still hardly believe the constant movement of the living realms, but she was beginning to get used to its never-ending whirl. The recollections of the dead, as real-seeming as they were, had not prepared her for this. Even the dank cave, featureless in concept, was full of detail and even life. Moths fluttered around lit candle stubs stuck haphazardly in convenient crevices, throwing little motes of shadow on the muted colors of the cave wall. Little animals shared a home with Loki, a little god. Loki crawled off to a corner to stare at his phone, eyes glazed over in blue light. Leah blew gently on the wicks of the gray candles in her candelabra and they flared to life. She pored over her books, as the candles in the crevices went out, and the sound of Loki’s tapping on his phone slowed and his breathing changed. She looked over, vaguely curious. The boy had fallen asleep. Strange that he should act like a mortal, she mused, sleeping and eating. She shivered suddenly. Alert, she thought she heard the faint sound of wings. She felt the presence of the wraith all at once, sliding into her conscious awareness. Why couldn’t she see it? Where was it hiding? Why was it following Loki? She stood up and scanned the room, but nothing revealed itself. Calming herself, she sat back down at her desk and smoothed her hair, letting her focus soften. She saw it out of the corner of her eye. Bird formed, a kind of pied bird, black and white with a blue sheen, it perched above the sleeping god. It glimmered with resigned anger, a wraith of thwarted ambition. She tried not catch its attention, but she lingered on its peculiar form for too long, and its black eye met hers. It opened its beak and said, “shh, best not wake the child,” with an eerie cheekiness. She started and looked away from it quickly, and by the time she tried looking again it was gone.


End file.
